With these troubleshooting tips in hand, you’ll be swatting away problems and getting back to business in no time—no aspirin required.

1. What to do when your Android phone freezes or won’t start

It’s one of the scariest feelings of our always-connected lives: glancing down at your phone and realizing it’s frozen on some screen and not responding to your touch.

Worse yet is the heart-dropping sensation you experience when you try to turn your phone on and absolutely nothing happens.

Before you launch into full-fledged CPR—which, in full disclosure, is more likely to result in a cracked screen than any sort of resuscitation—try the following troubleshooting steps:

1. Press and hold the power button for a full 30 seconds—and don’t cut it short.

Sometimes holding the power button down for an extended period of time is all it takes to wake and restart an unresponsive device.

2. If your phone won’t turn on at all, plug it into its charger and leave it for a solid couple of hours, then come back and try again.

I’ve personally seen numerous instances when a phone looks like it’s a goner, but the only problem is that its battery is dead.

Give it a whirl, even if it seems like there’s no logical reason for that to be the case (a misbehaving app can drain your battery in a surprisingly short amount of time).

3. Still no luck? Try pressing and holding your phone’s volume-down button and then pressing and holding the power button at the same time.

Hold both buttons down together for at least 10 seconds. If your phone was frozen, this should force it to reboot.

If the phone won’t turn on, this should force it to boot up to a recovery menu.

In the latter case, you’ll want to tap the volume-down key upon reaching that menu until you see an option for either powering off or restarting the phone—then tap the power button to select that option.

If the freezing keeps happening, it’s time to try booting your device into something known as Safe Mode,

which is a state that disables all apps you’ve downloaded and uses only the device’s original software.